Atlanta Is The Rare TV Comedy That Nails What It's Like to Be Broke

Atlanta is a very good show for big, bold reasons—but one of the most satisfying things it does is in its compassionate, quiet, and still very funny portrayal of the stress and pain of being broke. It's something the show has brought up subtly at first, and built on through it's run thus far. In the pilot, it is implied that protagonist Earn (Donald Glover) has more or less exhausted the goodwill of his family in his efforts to join the music industry instead of putting his energy towards landing a better-paying job than the one he has.

Earn's decision to persevere and get his cousin, the small-time rapper Paper Boi, airtime on the radio both lands him on track towards finally fulfilling his dream and sets him back financially even further. This is just as much a source of perpetual pain and frustration for Earn as it is some very funny scenes. Like the end of Episode Three, "Go For Broke," in which Earn, having less than a hundred dollars to his name, lies to his girlfriend Van and takes her out for an expensive dinner anyway. Or the bizarre genius of the following episode, "The Streisand Effect," wherein Earn, desperate for some cash to make ends meet, agrees to follow the advice of Paper Boi's stoner-shaman pal Darius and not pawn his phone, instead launching into a series of increasingly strange transactions that will net him a lot more cash than he would've gotten from the pawned phone... months from when he actually needs it.

There's also this week's episode, "Value," which almost entirely ignores Earn to focus on Van, opening up on a dinner date with a friend of hers who is now dating a wealthy athlete and enjoying all the benefits that comes with it. It's a remarkably deft portrait of the push-and-pull that can occur when people from entirely different income brackets spend time together. Is Van's wealthy friend ordering expensive dishes because she enjoys them, or is her order performative? Can Van play off ordering a simple pad thai in a way that doesn't suggest she can't afford an order like that of her friend's? What the hell's going to happen when the check gets here?

Poverty is a challenge to portray on television because television is about creating options, opening up paths to new stories and situations and growth. Poverty is about a lack of options, and the crippling inability to find new ones. The fact that the world is economically structured to keep money more or less where it is—you know, rich gettin' richer and the poor gettin' poorer—means that if you have characters that are poor the way people are actually poor in the real world, it's likely to assume that aspect of their lives won't get a whole lot much better. In short, you are committing to a story with characters who have limited options. You can't, on a whim, decide to take them to Italy, or on a booze cruise, or to a gallery opening. Money causes the world to expand and contract.

But money, and the lack of it, is also a great source of conflict. Comedy thrives on conflict, every exchange of setup and punchline and one liner is like a choreographed fight scene, with laughter instead of broken bones. Our financial and economic status is a fount of countless social cues that are never spoken of in polite conversation. Money is at the heart of Van's expensive restaurant trip with her friend, it's part of the tension between Earn and his parents, or Earn and Van. It's maybe not the most important thing about these characters and the relationships between them, but it is always there. (This is, perhaps, where TV errs most with poverty: By having characters that can afford to forget their lack of money.)

Poverty is a challenge to portray on television because television is about creating options. Poverty is about a lack of options.

That's not to say that modern sitcoms don't have broke characters, or that they shy away from having thin wallets as major plot points. In fact, several trumpet the financial difficulty of their characters. 2 Broke Girls, a CBS sitcom that has gone on for six seasons with millions of people watching, let's you know right there in the title. But 2 Broke Girls is also emblematic of what's become a common approach to comedic portrayals of poverty: It's really only brought up as a strut to prop up something else. In the case of 2 Broke Girls, it's really bad jokes. Its leads take working-class service jobs like waitressing and babysitting so they can be demeaned, only that disrespect isn't really treated as much more than a setup for the eventual punchline.

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The HBO series Girls, similarly focused on young twenty-somethings, sometimes makes a fuss about how its characters lack money, but this is ultimately undercut by its other, more primary interests: Its cast of characters' pursuit of fulfillment and happiness. If Girls has a central question, it is whether or not its characters will reach a point in their life where they will accept and shoulder responsibility. That's a question poverty cannot afford, because poverty has a way of thrusting responsibility on you.

Most offensive is probably Netflix's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which treats the perpetual broke-ness of struggling actor Titus Andromedon as something bohemian and cute, with jokes about roaches and bedbugs that come across as weirdly charming. (If these examples seem strange in that they are all of shows about women, it's because money is almost never a problem for men on TV comedies. Consider Max from Happy Endings, perpetually unemployed but never the least bit worried about it.)

What's strange about this is that TV comedy used to be very good at portraying financial difficulty in both casual and explicit ways without sacrificing humor. From The Honeymooners to Roseanne and Malcolm in the Middle, the difficulties of living a comfortable life have long been a sitcom staple. Now, TV comedies are better than they have been in years. They're smarter, more diverse, and more empathetic than ever, and they explore subject matter so varied and raw—from PTSD to the afterlife—that they put most TV dramas to shame. That's part of what makes the wide swath of TV comedy's attitude so frustrating, because if there's one way that people in the real world cope with not having money, it's by being really, really funny.

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